languagehat.com

In my dual capacity as linguist (manqué) and copyeditor (retired), I have often had occasion to ruminate here and elsewhere on the tensions involved in trying to correct copy to be printed while not actually believing in traditional concepts of what’s “correct.” Jonathon Owen, a linguist/editor who blogs at Arrant Pedantry (“Examining language rules and where they come from”), has a post that expresses my feelings on the subject perhaps better than I’ve ever done:

A while ago at work, I ran into a common problem: trying to decide whether to stop editing out a usage I don’t like. In this case, it was a particular use of “as such” that was bothering me. To me, “as such” is a prepositional phrase, and “such” is a pronoun that must refer to some sort of noun or noun phrase, as in “I’m a copy editor; as such, I fix bad writing.” In this sentence, “such” refers to the noun phrase “a copy editor”; in other words, it means, “I’m a copy editor; as a copy editor, I fix bad writing.”

But most of the time when I encounter it nowadays, it’s simply used to mean “therefore” or “consequently” (for more on that, see this post I wrote several years ago for Visual Thesaurus). And when I encountered it on that day, I changed it, as I always had before. But this time, I kept thinking about what makes a usage right or wrong and how we as editors decide which rules to enforce and which ones to let slide.

“As such” may be a simple transitional adverb for most people, but I still reflexively look for a noun phrase for that “such” to refer to. And I do this even though I know I’m in the minority. I can look at the evidence and see that the shift has happened, but it hasn’t happened in my own mental grammar.

And I think this tells us a lot about why it’s so hard for us to change our minds about usage. Knowing that I’m in the minority hasn’t magically changed how the phrase works in my head. Some things are so habitual that it’s hard to root them out. And of course there’s more than a bit of snobbery at work too—the adverbial use of “as such” sounds less educated to me, so I don’t have much incentive to give up my meaning for the new one.

He goes on to discuss the question “What makes a particular usage correct?” and to say “I don’t believe it’s possible to come up with any reliable test for deciding which rules to enforce and which to abandon,” ending with this passage:
[Read more…]

Zack Zwiezen has a nice piece in Kotaku:

Fans working with experts have translated all of the Kanien’kehá:ka dialogue that appears in the Vinland section of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Around the halfway point or so of the massive Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Evior takes a trip to Vinland, an area of coastal North America. During her time in Vinland she meets the Kanien’kehá:ka, or the Mohawk people. She doesn’t understand their language and the game doesn’t provide a translation, so unless you speak the language, you’ll be just as lost as Eivor. However, the native people you meet are speaking a real language and Ubisoft worked closely with a Kanien’kehá:ka language consultant to make sure they got it right. So translating this dialogue would provide us an interesting new insight into how these people reacted to Eivor and what they thought about the situation.

The Assassin’s Creed superfans over at Access The Animus decided to do just that. The group worked with Kanien’kehá:ka Onkwawén:na Raotitióhkwa Language and Cultural Center to help properly translate all of the Native American dialogue featured in the game. Access The Animus also helpfully provides some extra context for some of the dialogue, showing how it is connecting to Assassin’s Creed Rogue and Assassin’s Creed III.

I don’t do video games, but that’s pretty cool. (Hat tip to Slavo/bulbul on FB.)

Also, the first edition (2002) of the World Lexicon of Grammaticalization by Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva can be downloaded free at ResearchGate.

I’ve chuckled at Jack Winter’s brilliant “How I Met My Wife” (originally in the July 25, 1994, New Yorker; archived) a number of times over the years, but apparently I’ve never posted about it, so here it is:

It had been a rough day, so when I walked into the party I was very chalant, despite my efforts to appear gruntled and consolate.

I was furling my wieldy umbrella for the coat check when I saw her standing alone in a corner. She was a descript person, a woman in a state of total array. Her hair was kempt, her clothing shevelled, and she moved in a gainly way.

I wanted desperately to meet her, but I knew I’d have to make bones about it, since I was travelling cognito. Beknownst to me, the hostess, whom I could see both hide and hair of, was very proper, so it would be skin off my nose if anything bad happened. And even though I had only swerving loyalty to her, my manners couldn’t be peccable. Only toward and heard-of behavior would do.

Fortunately, the embarrassment that my maculate appearance might cause was evitable. There were two ways about it, but the chances that someone as flappable as I would be ept enough to become persona grata or a sung hero were slim. I was, after all, something to sneeze at, someone you could easily hold a candle to, someone who usually aroused bridled passion.

So I decided not to risk it. But then, all at once, for some apparent reason, she looked in my direction and smiled in a way that I could make heads or tails of.

I was plussed. It was concerting to see that she was communicado, and it nerved me that she was interested in a pareil like me, sight seen. Normally, I had a domitable spirit, but, being corrigible, I felt capacitated—as if there were something I was great shakes at—and forgot that I had succeeded in situations like this only a told number of times. So, after a terminable delay, I acted with mitigated gall and made my way through the ruly crowd with strong givings.

Nevertheless, since this was all new hat to me and I had no time to prepare a promptu speech, I was petuous. Wanting to make only called-for remarks, I started talking about the hors d’oeuvres, trying to abuse her of the notion that I was sipid, and perhaps even bunk a few myths about myself.

She responded well, and I was mayed that she considered me a savory character who was up to some good. She told me who she was. “What a perfect nomer,” I said, advertently. The conversation became more and more choate, and we spoke at length to much avail. But I was defatigable, so I had to leave at a godly hour. I asked if she wanted to come with me. To my delight, she was committal. We left the party together and have been together ever since. I have given her my love, and she has requited it.

Thanks, Jack!

Sara Minogue reports for CBC News:

New research on a trove of 13th century moccasins is shedding light on how the Dene language may have spread across North America. The distinctly subarctic Dene moccasins were discovered in the Promontory Caves in Utah nearly 100 years ago. They’re believed to be evidence that some Dene people left northwestern North America and successfully resettled in what is now the American southwest. Dry conditions in the cave preserved what would usually be perishable goods, including about 350 moccasins and thousands of animal bones. Most of the moccasins were made from locally gathered materials, but recent chemical analysis found one outlier: an ankle tie that came from a bison believed to have lived 700 to 800 kilometres further south.

Jessica Metcalfe, an assistant professor of anthropology at Lakehead University, used data based on the archeological remains of other ancient bison to determine that the animal lived off plants that would have only grown in a much warmer climate. Further chemical analysis ruled out the idea that the bison wandered north, or that the leather was obtained through trade. She believes the leather shows that the people who lived in the cave were travelling long distances and returning, “probably for the purpose of scouting.”

Metcalfe says this is “the first time past human migrations have been reconstructed using chemical traces in footwear.” Her analysis, published earlier this month in the journal American Antiquity, puts the subarctic Dene group closer to the homelands of the Navajo and Apache than has previously been documented. Dene languages, also known as the Athapaskan languages, are one of the most widespread Indigenous languages in North America, but there is little in the archeological record that explains how the languages spread, and why there are two distinct groupings nearly two-thousand kilometers apart.

(Dene is the common word for ‘people’ in the Athapaskan languages.) I’ll be curious to know what those Hatters who know more than I about Native American linguistic history make of this. Thanks, Trevor!

OUPBlog has a quiz to plug Ralph Keyes’ book The Hidden History of Coined Words; I got fewer than half the answers right, but didn’t feel bad about it because by and large it’s not the kind of thing you can expect to know unless you’ve read the book. But it’s fun, and you’ll learn stuff.

Also, remember this post about Alice Gregory’s New Yorker article “How Did a Self-Taught Linguist Come to Own an Indigenous Language?”? One of the things that annoyed me didn’t get mentioned in the post, and I was glad to see this letter about it in the new issue:

I appreciated how Alice Gregory, in her article about the history and the future of the Penobscot language, critiques the colonialist underpinnings of linguistics and language preservation (“Final Say,” April 19th). But, as someone with a background in linguistics, I felt that her argument was undercut by exoticized descriptions of Penobscot, which she portrays as “melodic, gentle, and worn-sounding” and “especially visual, efficient, and kinetic.” Virtually all languages have variations in tone or pitch, and tonal languages such as Mandarin might sound particularly “foreign” to an English speaker. Yet it seems problematic to describe a conversation in Penobscot as being “like a choir lesson” if the goal is to promote the language’s use in daily life. Gregory also observes that “single words can express full ideas” in Penobscot, but this quality, called “synthesis” by linguists, is not dissimilar to the agglutinative aspects (in which strings of suffixes and prefixes can be added to a single word) of languages such as Turkish, Hungarian, and Japanese—or even to German’s compound nouns. These languages are rarely described poetically. Though there is nothing wrong with finding a language beautiful, we should be wary of giving credence to the idea that mystical-sounding or aesthetically pleasing languages are worthier of preservation and revitalization.

Julia Clark
Los Angeles, Calif.

You tell ’em, Ms. Clark.

Thatching Info.com is one of those delightful sites that assembles masses of detail about some subject unknown to most people today:

The information available here, is the result of over three decades of practical experience, plus more than a dozen years of research; into the history and various working methods, employed in the craft of thatching. The research included an eighteen thousand mile trip around most of Britain. Thus this site covers thatching throughout the Island of Britain and the islands around it, from Shetland to Sark, with a few excursions to other lands…

Of course what caught my attention was this, in the following paragraph: “there is a large glossary to help you.” And so there is, A Glossary of Thatching Names and Terms:

As well as a list of the technical terms and names, used throughout this site; I have also included other names, which are not mentioned in the text. Hopefully allowing this glossary to also act as a basic reference, to the myriad nomenclature found in the craft. Also included are terms from the dialects and languages, of the Channel Islands, Cornwall, Wales and Scotland…. […] Alternative names are in brackets. Other glossary entries are in italics. (I have not cross referenced all the various names, for a Thatching Spar, due to the many terms, used to describe this humble article….

The main list runs from A Frame (Principal Rafter) “The largest timbers, in a normal roof construction” to Yoke (Jack or Groom) “A forked stick, used to carry a Burden of Yealms on to a roof,” including such savory terms as Biddle (either “A wooden frame, with pair of spikes set in the top” or “Yet another name for a Legget or Bat”), Flaughter Spade (“A form of breast plough”), Tekk (“The name, used in Shetland, for Oat Straw”), and Witch’s seat (“a large flat stone set in a chimney”); then there follow lists of terms from the Channel Islands (“Gllic: Thatch”), Cornwall (“Teyz: Thatch also a Roof, suggesting they were one and the same for a long time”), Wales (“Gwrachod: A tied underlayer of thatch”), and Scotland (“Fraoch: Heather or Ling”).

Finally a couple of Gaelic proverbs…

Is tr’om sn’ithe air tigh gun tughadh… Rain drops come heavy, on a house unthatched.

Tigh a tughadh gun a sh’iomaineachadh… Thatching a house without roping it. (Is to surely labour in vain!)

And of course there are plenty of informative images.

In 2008 I posted about Sarah Ruden’s then-new translation of the Aeneid; now there’s a fresh contender, by Shadi Bartsch [I messed up the names in the first version of this post — sorry!]. Stuart Lyons’ brief review at Classics for All convinces me that if I actually buy another version, it will be Ruden’s:

B.’s new translation has been praised by an American professor as ‘probably the best version of the Aeneid in modern English’. Pacy and often colloquial, with occasional italics for emphasis, much of it reads like prose. A passage in 11.85-88 illustrates the differing treatments […] B., eschewing initial upper-case letters, translates:

‘Wretched Acoetes, weak with age, was led
along. He beat his chest with fists and clawed his face,
falling prostrate on the ground. Next came chariots
spattered with Rutulian blood [and Pallas’ warhorse … ]’

The enjambment of ‘led / along’ is jarring. It distorts Virgil’s architecture and leads to the unidiomatic two-syllable expression ‘with fists’. Nor does B.’s ‘falling prostrate on the ground’ do justice to sternitur et toto proiectus corpore terrae. B. reduces Virgil’s four lines to three and a half before her text merges mid-line into a new period.

Enjambment and compression pervade B’s translation. […] Such preferences give this result as Dido’s story reaches its climax (4.296-300):

at regina dolos (quis fallere possit amantem?)
praesensit, motusque excepit prima futuros
omnia tuta timens. eadem impia Fama furenti
detulit armari classem cursumque parari.

‘But Dido sensed the trick (who can deceive
a lover?) and the launch they planned. Now everything
seemed suspect, even if it wasn’t. That same impious
Rumor told the desperate queen the fleet prepared
to sail.’

Here, motusque excepit prima futuros surely means ‘she was the first to get wind of his future movements’; armari is omitted, as is the English ‘that’, which elegance demands be inserted after ‘queen’.

Generally, B.’s translation is accurate, but there are lapses, e.g. quattuor a stabulis praestanti corpore tauros (8.207) become ‘seven perfect bulls’.

Frankly, I was already recoiling at “much of it reads like prose,” but the details (more at the link, of course) put the nail in the coffin. Translating is hard, and newer is not always better.

Back in 2009 I posted a translation of a Bunin short story, Книга [Book], because I loved it and there were no English versions online; now I’m doing the same for another Bunin story, Пингвины [Penguins]. I sometimes pick up my fat Bunin collection and flip through to find a story I haven’t read when I don’t feel like tackling a new novel yet; a couple of weeks ago my eye fell on the odd title Пингвины at the top of p. 1114 in the table of contents and I thought I’d give it a try. It was so unusual and gripping it wouldn’t let go of me, and I finally had to translate it (and wound up memorizing a good chunk of it in the process). It’s perhaps a slight spoiler to say it’s an account of a dream, but that quickly becomes apparent; the thing about dreams in fiction is that they’re usually either tediously Freudian or pointless echoes of something in the main narrative — if your hero is being beset by enemies, I don’t need to wade through a dream about a bear attacked by hounds, thank you very much. But this has nothing in common with such fictional dreams; it’s self-contained, and its purpose seems to be to give as vivid a picture as possible of what dreaming is actually like, at which it succeeds brilliantly. The sudden changes of locale and of mood, the uncertainty, the intrusions of the inexplicable: it’s all there. (Gurzuf and Bakhchisarai are towns in the Crimea; Pushkin wrote poems about both.) And the ending is very funny.

The Russian text is here, or if you prefer the old spelling (as it was published in his 1931 collection Божье древо [Southern wormwood]) here. Obviously I had to make a lot of difficult translation choices; I’ll just mention that I rendered карагач [karagach] etymologically as “black elm” (I don’t think there is such a term in English) because, as my wife pointed out, if I had “karagach” it would just be a meaningless lump in the English text, whereas the Russian reader at least knows it’s a tree. For general context on these short plotless stories, I’ll quote a perhaps relevant bit from the note on Книга [Book] here: “Бунин всю жизнь был убежден, что художник должен все им виденное и пережитое записывать” [Bunin all his life was convinced that an artist should write down everything seen and experienced by him]. And I’ll also quote something vitalir wrote on flibusta: “Люблю Бунина. Может быть Россия Бунина для меня и есть град Китеж, не знаю. […] Блядь, народ, как можно не прочитать Бунина?” [I love Bunin. Maybe Bunin’s Russia is the city of Kitezh for me, I don’t know. … Fuck, people, how can you not read Bunin?]
[Read more…]

Another great passage from Judith Flanders’ A Place For Everything via Joel at Far Outliers:

Arabic dictionaries also used nonalphabetical methods of organizing. The Mukhaṣṣaṣ, or The Categorized, by Ibn Sīda (d. 1066), was divided, as its title states, by subject or topic, beginning with human nature and continuing on to physiology, psychology, women, clothes, food, and weapons. Al-Khalīl Ibn Aḥmad (d. 791), in his Kitāb al-‘ain, The Book of [the Letter] ‘Ain, used sounds to organize his work: he listed entries in an order of his own, where each sound group was followed by subcategories based on how many consonants a word contained. …

These mainly nonalphabetical developments contrasted with the works of Hebrew scholars, who tended toward alphabetical order simultaneously with (and occasionally a little ahead of) their Christian contemporaries. At the end of the eleventh century, Nathan ben Jehiel (c. 1035–c. 1110) produced his Sefer ha’Arukh, The Set Book. Ben Jehiel, who had been born in Rome, spoke Arabic, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Latin, Persian, and Syriac, and he drew on his knowledge of these languages to produce an alphabetically ordered book of root words occurring in rabbinic literature. It became one of the best-known dictionaries of its type—more than fifty copies survive—as well as being one of the first Hebrew books to be printed, in Rome sometime before 1472.

Many of these works, both in Arabic and Hebrew, and the scholarship that had produced them, became accessible to scholars in Western Europe for the first time as these languages began to be more widely translated into Latin. … That so many of these works returned to the West via Arabic was significant, for earlier Arab scholars had frequently added substantially to the originals, including details of their own work, which was far in advance of much of Western thought at the time.

The Western rediscovery of the classics had two results, one somewhat abstract, one concrete. More generally, the awareness of how many great works had been entirely unknown before the lifetimes of these new readers, and of how many more had been permanently lost, produced a sense that the current generation needed to ensure that this recaptured knowledge, as well as all the works produced under its influence, were preserved for future generations. Further, it created a drive to ensure that the details contained in all these new works could be found easily—in other words, readers wanted not merely to read the books, but to refer to them: they wanted search tools.

These recently translated manuscripts also brought to the West other elements that are crucial for our story. Educated European readers now became increasingly familiar with foreign alphabets. In Italy and France in particular, Hebrew had routinely been transliterated into the roman alphabet when manuscripts were copied; in the rest of Europe, the Greek alphabet had sometimes been used, but less and less as time went on. In Europe, apart from Spain, where Arabic was in common use, Arabic too had been almost always transliterated into the roman alphabet. By contrast, some in the British Isles were familiar with Old English runes, known as futhorc, or with the Irish writing system known as Ogham. Many more would have recognized, and used in conjunction with the roman alphabet, the Old English runic letters such as thorn (Þ, þ) and wynn (Ρ, ρ). For these reasons, “foreign”-looking letters were more familiar and less unnerving in the British Isles, and so Latin and Hebrew letters were both used, as they were from the ninth century in Germany, a regular destination for highly educated monks from Ireland and Britain.

Victor Mair at the Log reports on an interesting Japanese compound verb that seems to be an adequate substitute for English profanity; he’s discussing this headline from “Japan’s hard-right, anti-China Sankei newspaper”:

「中国よ、消えうせやがれ」 フィリピン外相、“禁句”使って怒り爆発

“Chūgoku yo, kieuseyagare” Firipin gaishō “kinku” tsukatte ikari bakuhatsu

“Hey China, fuck off!” Philippines foreign minister uses taboo word in angry explosion

Mair writes:

The first three characters are the rough equivalent of “Hey China!” (“Chūgoku yo”). So far so good. It gets even better, though, because the delightfully nuanced verbal phrase “get the fuck out” gets translated as a compound of three verbs: “kie-use-yagare.”

[Read more…]